EA Poland is facing an existential risk

EA Poland

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New & upvoted

I would really like to see EA funding orgs more explicitly discuss the costs of the uncertainty their one-grant-at-a-time funding models plus short notice times of (non-)renewal impose on so many people in the EA community. I realise EA funding took a big hit last year, but for years before FTX Foundation was announced, 80k were claiming EA was talent-constrained rather than funding constrained, and than most EAs should not be earning to give. The net result is that there are a bunch of people with EA-relevant talents that aren't particularly applicable outside the EAsphere, who are struggling to make ends meet, or whose livelihood could disappear with little warning.

After hearing multiple experiences like this it's really hard for me to encourage anyone go into EA meta work until the landscape gets a lot smoother.

D0TheMath

I do dislike this feature of EA, but I don't think the solution is to transition away from a one-grant-at-a-time model. Probably better would be to have exit-coaches to help EAs find a new career outside EA, if they built up a bunch of skills because funding sources or other generally EA-endorsed sources told them they would give them money if they used such skills for the benefit of the universe.

What talents do you think aren't applicable outside the EAsphere?

(Edit: I do also note that I believe 80k should be taken a lot less seriously than they present themselves, and that most EAs take them. Their incorrect claims of EA being talent constrained one of many reasons I distrust them)

Arepo

I'm not sure what the solution is - more experimentation seems generally like a good idea, but EA fundmakers seem quite conservative in the way they operate, at least once they've locked in a modus operandi.

For what it's worth, my instinct is to try a model with more 'grantmakers' who take a more active, product-managery/ownery role, where they make fewer grants, but the grants are more like contracts of employment, such that the grantmakers take some responsibility for the ultimate output (and can terminate a contract like a normal employer if the 'grant recipient' underperforms). This would need a lot more work-hours, but I can imagine it more than paying itself back through the greater security of the grant recipients and the increased accountability for both recipients and grantmakers.

What talents do you think aren't applicable outside the EAsphere?

Community building doesn't seem to have that much carryover - that's not to say it's useless, just that it's not going to look anywhere as good to most employers as something vaguely for-profit equivalent, like being a consultant at some moderately prestigious firm. Research seems comparable. It's unlikely to be taken seriously for academic jobs, and likely to be far too abstract for for-profits. In general, grantees and even employees at small EA orgs get little if any peer support or training budgets, which will stymie their professional development even when they're working in roles that have direct for-profit equivalents (I've written a little about this phenomenon for the specific case of EA tech work here).

AnonymousTurtle

I agree that a one-grant-at-a-time funding model has downsides, but mostly I see many EA-meta projects funded with little to no feedback loops or oversight.

In for-profit jobs, people usually have managers, and if their work doesn't get the expected results they get negative feedback and improvement plans before being fired or moved to different roles.

In meta-EA, I often see people get funding with no strings attached and no measurement of effectiveness, the only feedback they get is if they have their grants renewed one year later. I think a better solution than multi-year no-strings-attached funding would be to have way more regular feedback from funders, to get advice or at least not be surprised if they decide to not renew your grant.

I also think this has very bad selection effects in people optimizing their grant applications instead of their positive impact, since the applications is often the ~only information that funders have, and I'm worried that some funded EA meta projects that spent a lot of time on their grant applications are actually having negative counterfactual impact.

I also think that as long as you have clear, (ideally measurable) counterfactual results and a strong theory of change, it's relatively easy to get funding for EA meta work (compared to e.g. animal welfare or global health).

For work in global health, you should stop getting funded if your work is less cost-effective than buying more bednets. Similarly, in EA meta you should stop getting funded if your work is less cost-effective than buying more ads for 80k (as a random example of highly effective infinitely scalable intervention, I don't know what the ideal benchmark should be). If EA Poland could show that their programs are more cost-effective than e.g. more ads for 80k, I think people that are currently funding 80k ads would fund them instead.

The net result is that there are a bunch of people with EA-relevant talents that aren't particularly applicable outside the EAsphere

I think this is extremely bad regardless of the funding model and funding situation, and people should try very hard to avoid this. This would lead to terrible incentives and dynamics, and probably make you less effective in your EA role (including community building). See My mistakes on the path to impact, I recommend reading the whole post, but here's one quote

I could have noticed the conflict between the talent-constrained message as echoed by the community with the actual 80,000 Hours advice to keep your options open and having Plan A, B and Z.

John Salter

Upvoted. It's great when people put their requests on the forum so they can be scrutinized thoroughly by the community.

I know nothing about community building. Regardless, here are some things I think would make your case stronger to the average reader:

Listing some notable Polish EAs, especially if your outreach brought them into the movement. You've mentioned some organisations, but it's costly for the reader to figure out who exactly you're referring to and what your role was.
There are some places where vagueness could be concealing strength/weakness. For example, you've referred to your slack participants doubling. This could be from two people to four or from 10000 to 20000.
It seems as though you're pursuing five strategies at once as a fairly small organisation. This is generally a bad idea, because doing one thing well is hard as it is. Can you elaborate on why you think such a broad focus is called for? (e.g. perhaps they are synergistic, or other similar orgs have had success with this approach)
It's not clear why your plans for 2024 have been made. Can you comment a little on each and why you feel they are high EV?
I suppose your major competitor for this type of funding is Meta Charity Funders themselves. Why should the reader donate to you rather than to them? After all, they are supposedly the experts on what meta charities deserve funding. Wouldn't it be better to give them the money and letting them choose the best charity that's gone unfunded from their applicant pool?

EA Poland

Hi John,

Thank you once more for the valuable feedback. We will address your points in this comment and update the post accordingly.

Now, to your points:

Listing some notable Polish EAs, especially if your outreach brought them into the movement. You've mentioned some organisations, but it's costly for the reader to figure out who exactly you're referring to and what your role was.

We think it’s a fair point and we added Karolina Sarek to Charity Entrepreneurship and Klau Chmielowska to Lafiya Nigeria. We have changed OpenCages to Anima International. That comes after the discussion with their representative who confirmed today that the Polish team from OpenCages is responsible for setting up this international initiative. Now, OpenCages is one of the chapters. We provide Jakub Stencel, as an example of EA behind this project, but more Poles were involved. Note that the team currently running EA Poland had no influence over these individuals or organizations. We mentioned them as the first argument for Poland being potentially a great source of highly talented, morally ambitious people.

2. There are some places where vagueness could be concealing strength/weakness. For example, you've referred to your slack participants doubling. This could be from two people to four or from 10000 to 20000.

Good point, we updated it. We are talking about going from about 15 volunteers to 30 and from ~29 daily active members in June 2022 to ~66 in November 2023.

3. It seems as though you're pursuing five strategies at once as a fairly small organization. This is generally a bad idea, because doing one thing well is hard as it is. Can you elaborate on why you think such a broad focus is called for? (e.g. perhaps they are synergistic, or other similar orgs have had success with this approach)

That’s totally how it could be read and we have extended this part to give more context.

To begin with, we don’t think there is a clear answer as to what is the right approach to movement building in Poland (or EA movement building overall) or how to best utilize the local opportunities for positive impact exertion. Over time, we expect to gain more certainty and be able to double down on some activities. However, we are merely over one year in and we simply lack the data. That is why we decided to try out different projects, evaluate the results, pivot whenever needed, and distribute our resources in accordance with the expected value.

A crucial element that was missing in the original post we would like to add to that topic is the immense help we receive from a group of 30 dedicated volunteers (Active Members). Without them, some of the plans would probably not even be considered here, e.g. intro to EA and AI Fundamentals fellowships.

We have highlighted the role of our Active Members in the linked post, but of course, we should not expect people to jump all across the forum to find relevant information.

We think that with the current/planned (depending on the project’s status - most of them are pending, but Governance and Democracy is just a plan) responsibility and resource distribution, we can do well in each of the projects and gain necessary data to determine whether to scale-up, limit, put on hold or reject any of them.

If we suddenly lose some of our resources and can’t carry out e.g. the fellowships, it would be very unfortunate, but it does not damage the community’s health or tarnish EA’s reputation. We “just” lose the potential of the positive impact. The same can be applied to the majority of our plans.

It is probably worth adding that it is not like the focus of the three of us is stretched across all the mentioned projects. For instance, AI Safety field building coordination consumes up to 10% of Chris’s time and nearly none of the rest of the employees. We attribute most of the progress in this area to our Active Members. Moreover, the long-term goal (1-3 years) is to let some of our projects thrive as stand-alone entities and with separate management, e.g. the effective giving platform (the Dutch platform is a great example of such a successful incubation).

4. It's not clear why your plans for 2024 have been made. Can you comment a little on each and why you feel they are high EV?

The post has been updated with the relevant information.

5. I suppose your major competitor for this type of funding is Meta Charity Funders themselves. Why should the reader donate to you rather than to them? After all, they are supposedly the experts on what meta charities deserve funding. Wouldn't it be better to give them the money and letting them choose the best charity that's gone unfunded from their applicant pool?

We see that Caleb and Henri already answered and we don’t have anything more to add.

Henri Thunberg 🔸

5. [...] Wouldn't it be better to give them the money and letting them choose the best charity that's gone unfunded from their applicant pool?

FWIW, I don't think this Meta Charity Funders' model. I think they let funders join rather than donate to a pool. As far as I understand, after joining you access communal resources to best decide on grants – but the decision itself of where to donate remains with yourself as original funder.

Lowe Lundin

This understanding is correct. All funding decisions are made by individual members and decisions don't necessarily reflect the aggregate view of the circle.

calebp

I suppose your major competitor for this type of funding is Meta Charity Funders themselves. Why should the reader donate to you rather than to them? After all, they are supposedly the experts on what meta charities deserve funding. Wouldn't it be better to give them the money and letting them choose the best charity that's gone unfunded from their applicant pool?

As Henri says I don't think this is their model. Also, they haven't operated for very long, and I don't think they claim to have much expertise in funding meta-charities (though that's not to say they won't do an excellent job - I think it's just a bit more of a judgment call).

EA Poland

John, Henri thank you very much for these comments, good points! We will try to address them by the end of the day.

EA Poland

UPDATE (24.11.23):

Thanks to your support, we have crossed the milestone of 1x 0,5FTE for 2024!

So far, we have collected $18.6k: $9k through fundraising among the Polish community members before posting on the EA forum and $9.6k since the post. It is a total of individual donations and subscriptions x14 (entire 2024 + Nov and Dec 2023)

9 more people contributing $100/month would let us reach 1 FTE.

The subscriptions currently range from ~$10/month to $500/month and each makes a difference.

To reach the optimal scenario where all 3 of us continue the work full time, we need to raise $70,7k more. There is still a long way to go, but driven by the expected value, we will fundraise our fingers to the bones.

Henri Thunberg 🔸

On the other hand, by filling the gap for 2024 we think there is over a 90% chance that we will be able to reach a sustainability tipping point i.e. have a viable income stream for at least 1 FTE and therefore avoid similar threats in the future.

Is your claim that for funding of 2025, you will have ≥1 FTE funding (120k >loty / 29k USD) ready at the end of 2024 – excluding Open Philanthropy, EA Infrastructure Fund, and Meta Charity Funders? Or does the statement permit grants from those sources?

EA Poland

Hi Henri,

Thanks for your question! Our statement permits grants from those sources but assumes they won’t cover more than 60% of the total budget.

Jakub K. Nowak🔸

https://pomagam.pl/en/myt4k9

EA Poland is very much still facing an existential risk

Right now they started a fundraiser for ~20k USD (see above). You can donate with PayPal / Visa / MasterCard (but reach out to them if you want to use something different, all is possible).

This is an impact-oriented career advising project but no one is sitting on their hands waiting for the funding. The team is trying to push it forward with all the free time and willpower that is left in them despite being denied funding one grant after another.

I nudged them to publish a linkpost, as the fundraiser has a description in english now and maybe some EAs from abroad would be willing to donate.

Comments

EA Poland

Hi John,

Thank you once more for the valuable feedback. We will address your points in this comment and update the post accordingly.

Now, to your points:

Listing some notable Polish EAs, especially if your outreach brought them into the movement. You've mentioned some organisations, but it's costly for the reader to figure out who exactly you're referring to and what your role was.

2. There are some places where vagueness could be concealing strength/weakness. For example, you've referred to your slack participants doubling. This could be from two people to four or from 10000 to 20000.

Good point, we updated it. We are talking about going from about 15 volunteers to 30 and from ~29 daily active members in June 2022 to ~66 in November 2023.

3. It seems as though you're pursuing five strategies at once as a fairly small organization. This is generally a bad idea, because doing one thing well is hard as it is. Can you elaborate on why you think such a broad focus is called for? (e.g. perhaps they are synergistic, or other similar orgs have had success with this approach)

That’s totally how it could be read and we have extended this part to give more context.

We have highlighted the role of our Active Members in the linked post, but of course, we should not expect people to jump all across the forum to find relevant information.

4. It's not clear why your plans for 2024 have been made. Can you comment a little on each and why you feel they are high EV?

The post has been updated with the relevant information.

5. I suppose your major competitor for this type of funding is Meta Charity Funders themselves. Why should the reader donate to you rather than to them? After all, they are supposedly the experts on what meta charities deserve funding. Wouldn't it be better to give them the money and letting them choose the best charity that's gone unfunded from their applicant pool?

We see that Caleb and Henri already answered and we don’t have anything more to add.

EA Poland is facing an existential risk

Update (29.05.24):

TL;DR:

Structure of the post

Why bother with Poland?

Where would the impact come from in 2024?

What is the problem and why do we think it can be temporary?

How is the positive impact going so far?

Conclusion